Woodside High School students Sand Hill Challenge soap box derby team. This is a race that began in 1997 involving silicon valley techies and dot-com people. When the silicon valley tech bust happened, the race was cancelled this year. The woman in the foreground at the far right is Jayne Williams, the event organizer. The high school won won first place in the high school division, which is that trophy at the left.
Photo by Craig Lee/San Francisco Chronicle less

Woodside High School students Sand Hill Challenge soap box derby team. This is a race that began in 1997 involving silicon valley techies and dot-com people. When the silicon valley tech bust happened, the race ... more

Photo: CRAIG LEE

Photo: CRAIG LEE

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Woodside High School students Sand Hill Challenge soap box derby team. This is a race that began in 1997 involving silicon valley techies and dot-com people. When the silicon valley tech bust happened, the race was cancelled this year. The woman in the foreground at the far right is Jayne Williams, the event organizer. The high school won won first place in the high school division, which is that trophy at the left.
Photo by Craig Lee/San Francisco Chronicle less

Woodside High School students Sand Hill Challenge soap box derby team. This is a race that began in 1997 involving silicon valley techies and dot-com people. When the silicon valley tech bust happened, the race ... more

Since way, way back in 1997 -- a veritable epoch in hyperspeed tech time - - the Sand Hill Challenge soapbox derby each September was a seasonal rite of swift passage in Silicon Valley that brought workers out of cubicles and blinking into broad daylight.

The charity race, contested on the famous Peninsula road supposedly paved with new-economy riches, became a status symbol among the tech glitterati and venture capitalists, and created its own kind of buzz.

Would the car made entirely from bread beat the aerodynamic Stanford Linear Accelerator entry? Would Olympic bobsledders once more be brought in as ringers? Would conspicuous consumption become, well, even more conspicuous in well-heeled Menlo Park?

But then came the Silicon Valley bust, and now the Sand Hill Challenge race has crashed and burned like so many dot-com startups.

Organizers needed only $75,000 -- a paltry figure, by local standards -- to put on this month's charity affair. But they couldn't raise the money from venture capitalists and large computer firms, so it's history after five years.

"Don't say it's dead," said Woodside real estate agent Jayne Williams, the event's organizer. "We're on hiatus. We have every intention to bring it back next year, or maybe the year after.

"Hopefully, the first quarter will be good for businesses next year. You know, companies have a hard time giving money to a fund-raiser when they're laying off employees."

SYMBOL OF HARD TIMES?

It would be too easy, perhaps, to say the demise of the Sand Hill Challenge serves as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of Silicon Valley, the here- today-with-a-splash, gone-tomorrow-without-a-trace corporate culture, where nothing seems real or lasting beyond the next profit statement.

But the big losers in the race's cancellation are not the titans of venture capital or the morale at participating high-tech companies -- it's the kids like those at Plugged In, an East Palo Alto nonprofit that provides computer training to low-income youths, and at the other nonprofits that benefited from the fund-raiser. Losing out, too, are Peninsula high school students who banded together each year to build cars sponsored by the high-tech giants.

Magda Escobar, executive director of Plugged In, said her organization doesn't know yet how it will recoup the $10,000 it received yearly from Sand Hill Challenge organizers. Escobar said Plugged In's donations have fallen sharply in the past year, but she says she's more disappointed that her kids won't be able to have the social experience of working with high-tech engineers and developing the race's Web site.

"We could use the donations, but our kids are not happy they've canceled the race," Escobar said. "That's tough on us. Every September, the kids would get real excited. Now, we hate to even mention it to them."

LOSS FOR STUDENTS

Williams, who co-founded the race with Woodside restaurateur Jamis MacNevin,

said she feels for the students who waited for their turn as seniors to participate in the race but now are denied the chance.

"Some of those kids waited three years to race," Williams said. "You can't tell those students to wait until next year, because they'll be off to college.

It's unfortunate."

Shannon Hughes, a Palo Alto resident whose lawyer husband helped students at Sequoia High School in Redwood City build a prize-winning entry last year, has not been so diplomatic. Hughes has written letters to the editor of local newspapers calling firms who pulled out of the event bad corporate neighbors.

"Charity, to them, is just another vehicle for self-promotion," Hughes said.

"I guess when you have nothing to promote, why spend money in the community? It's philanthropic apathy. They just used the Sand Hill race as an advertising branding opportunity. I don't think they really cared about charity."

Venture capitalists also have been criticized by one of their own. Lawrence Aragon, editor of Venture Capital Journal, wrote an editorial calling on executives to at least write big checks to organizations that will lose out, such as Plugged In.

'RIGHT THING TO DO'

"Not only is it the right thing to do," Aragon wrote, "it could only improve the image of venture capitalists, who came off as a greedy lot during the dot-com boom and bust."

Venture capitalists take exception. Venture Law Group Chairman and co- founder Craig Johnson, whose firm produced the now-famous "bread car" in 1997, says Silicon Valley businesspeople aren't neglecting their philanthropic responsibilities now that times are tough. He sees another dynamic at work in the derby's demise.

"People in Silicon Valley still give tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars each year to their favorite charities," Johnson said. "Rather, in the gloom of the last several years, I think people just got tired of being silly.

"I would not at all be surprised if the event comes alive again -- when economic times get better. Who could not like an event which one year started with 100 marching accordion players playing 'Lady of Spain' in unison? Or the founder arriving in full Arabian regalia on a camel?"